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LEGO House


The design and development of a series of educational, 

interactive exhibits for LEGO’s experience center






I was fortunate enough to be involved in the prototyping and user experience design phase of a few interactive exhibits for the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark. Rotterdam-based strategic design lab The Incredible Machine invited me to become part of the core team as the creative technologist and together we went through the iterative process of “getting the right design and the design right” (Bill Buxton). 

LEGO House aka the home of the brick houses a whole plethora of different ways to engage with and learn about LEGO. There are activity zones each focussing on different aspects of the LEGO experience. I primarily worked on the exhibits City Architect and Robo Lab. Over the course of ~1,5 years we developed and completed the dynamics and user experience design of these exhibits, working in close collaboration with staff of LEGO Design and doing numerous user tests with children of various ages and their parents. It was utterly delightful getting to experience how passionate and playful LEGO is about their brand.

Client
LEGO (via The Incredible Machine)

Collaborators
Kiss The Frog
My role
Programming, Interaction Design

Technologies used
  • Unity / HLSL - implementation of the visual side of the installations
  • LEGO Mindstorms - LEGO robots driven by commands from the Unity game
  • OptiTrack - motion capture system
  • NodeJS / HTML / OSC - web frontend to control the installations during the user testing cycles
  • Madmapper - projection mapping


City Architect

A city-building game based on exploring composition and variety. Supports different foundational blocks representing parks, commercial buildings, industry and homes. Players can build on these blocks freely and place them such that a happy and diverse city emerges. Although any action is rewarded the game subtly hints at what it needs, guiding players towards insights into actual city-planning guidelines. 



Robo Lab

A turn-based multiplayer game involving LEGO Mindstorms robots, integrated seamlessly into a projected polar landscape which they have contextual effect on. An educational game where players have to learn to complete tasks in the right order, intended to establish insights into procedural thinking.
This project was such a blast to work on! From iteratively discovering how to make the setting and complexity understandable yet challenging to the target age group to getting the whole array of separate systems to work in unison, this project was a creative and technical playground.